Day: November 11, 2021

Zuo Fang, a Founder of China’s Southern Weekly, is Dead

Chin@Strategy

Zuo Fang, a trailblazing journalist who helped start China’s most influential reform-era newspaper and edited it with the conviction that the press should inform, enlighten and entertain rather than parrot Communist Party propaganda, died on Nov. 3 in Guangzhou, China. He was 86. His death, in a hospital, was announced by the newspaper he co-founded, Southern Weekly. Southern Weekly — the paper prefers that English name over another common translation, Southern Weekend — was started in 1984 as the sister publication of Nanfang Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist…

Behind bars, Hong Kong’s democrats remain popular

Chin@Strategy

Nov 11th 2021 SOME NEW inmates in Hong Kong’s prisons have reading wishlists that reflect interests beyond such common behind-bars topics as self-improvement and how to exercise in small spaces. Their requests include dystopian novels about totalitarianism, such as George Orwell’s “1984” and “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, or books about struggles against authoritarian rule, including Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless” and “How To Feed A Dictator” by Witold Szablowski. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Enjoy more audio and podcasts…

China still steals commercial secrets for its own firms’ profit

Chin@Strategy

Nov 11th 2021 EARLIER THIS year Microsoft found that a group of hackers, which it called Hafnium, had broken into hundreds of thousands of computer servers around the world that were running the firm’s mail and calendar software. The cyber-thieves were stealing emails, documents and other data from small businesses, NGOs and local governments in an enormous, seemingly indiscriminate, cyber-attack. In July America, Britain, other members of NATO and the European Union all blamed China. America was more specific. It named China’s civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security…

Chinese Communist party elevates Xi’s status in ‘historical resolution’

Chin@Strategy

Xi Jinping’s grip on power has received a big boost after the ruling Communist party (CCP) passed a rare “historical resolution” praising the president’s “decisive significance” in the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. It is only the third resolution of its kind in the party’s 100-year history. The two previous resolutions were passed under Mao Zedong, who led the Communists to power in 1949, and Deng Xiaoping, whose reforms in the 1980s turned China into an economic powerhouse. The official summary of the resolution from the meeting said that under…